Saturday, February 26, 2011

When you want to connect to your DVR remotely, you will need to use either the internal or the external IP address. This will be determined by whether you are accessing the DVR from inside the network or from outside the network. If you are accessing the DVR from inside your network then you will use the internal IP address. The internalIP address will usually begin with 192.168.XX.XXX . No port number would be used since you are connecting internally. The internalIP address can usually be found in your DVR under network settings.

To access your DVR from outside the network, you will need to use an external IP address followed by the port number to identify the DVR (unless you put the DVR on port 80). An external IP address is the IP address used to connect to your router. The port number will identify the individual device inside the network you wish to access. So an externalIP address would not have 192.168 in the beginning but it could be anything else. An externalIP address would be entered as XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:port#

Private IP addresses exist to save on the limited number of available public IP addresses. There are actually 4 ranges of private addresses: 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255 when you need a lot (16,000,000+) of addresses in your internal network; 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 when you need up to a million or so; and 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 or 169.254.0.0 to 169.254.255.255 when you only need up to 254 addresses. These addresses must exist behind a router or gateway, not on the live Internet.

The real genius of these private IPs is that you can get one IP from your ISP (let's say 205.20.2.105), and your router / gateway basically splits that into however many internal (private) addresses you need.

A public IP address makes your equipment accessible to everyone on the internet and is needed for VoIP or if you want to give others to access to specific equipment on your network. You must therefore be careful to protect your equipment from hackers and viruses and not to allow your equipment to be hi-jacked and used as an open email-relay, for example. A private IP address is for private use within the network and allows many more PCs to be connected. If a customer is using a private IP and later wants VOIP they would need to change to a public IP address.

A static IP is one that will never change. A dynamic IP is exactly that, dynamic. It could change frequently, or not change for more than 1 year. It really depends on how the DHCP server that’s assigns the IPs is set up.